Moving to a New SAP VAR Partner – Why transition before the deadline?

SAP VAR partner transition

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Did you know that you are in no obligation to remain with your current SAP VAR Partner throughout the full lifecycle of your SAP contract? You can give notice to SAP of your intention to move to another VAR and Support provider before the end of September if you have seen any red flags, you are not getting the most value for money, or feel your system is not well looked after.

You have until the end of September to change your current SAP VAR partner for 2022

We are confident that we can provide better value for money and lower the costs of your existing VAR contract. Book in for a free, non-obligatory, 1 HOUR SAP VAR CONSULTATION before the end of September to see for yourself.

Moving to an alternative SAP Partner might seem a daunting, even scary, proposition to some. After all -retaining steady-state processes and technical landscape, with minimal disruption, is vital to the smooth running of your business, right?

So what should you look out for when you know the time has come to transition and how can you ensure a smooth process and added value?

In this blog post, I will address the three main questions that I seem to get asked on a regular basis.

  • Why should I review my existing VAR contract?
  • How can I guarantee more value for money with a new partner?
  • How can my new SAP VAR partner ensure a smooth transition?

 

Why should I review my existing SAP VAR Partner?

Often your SAP VAR offers a forum merely for purchasing new licences and escalation for support patches and bugs. You typically wouldn’t expect assistance in assessing improvements to your software landscape, proposing competitive pricing for maintenance, ensuring long-term longevity and relevance of your SAP estate.

Clients should be able to demand honest assessments of their SAP investment with opportunity to drive down maintenance charges and reduced licence exposure to ensure value for money and sustainable support programmes to meet your business operations demands.

With over 30 years of being an SAP VAR partner, using proven processes and procedures, we have noticed two real challenges that VAR customers face:

Maintaining value for money

SAP charges annual maintenance as a percentage of net licence price. Often that includes licences never used or planned for future phases. For a recent customer that Absoft works with, we identified incorrect licence consumption and were able to recommend savings to them of nearly £200k.

Lack of Pro-active system support

VAR’s should provide pro-active services; frequent licence audit checks, Early Watch reporting, Solution Manager updates and Technical Quality checks. Absoft have a commitment to provide quarterly VAR report which includes critical recommendations, maintenance phases, license usage and support entitlements.

Each of the many SAP support partners out there have their own unique selling points. How do you choose who to work with to make sure you are getting the most value and what do you need to look out for?

How can I guarantee more value for money with a new partner?

To guarantee yourself more value for money there is a number of things that you will need to consider with potential future partners.

  • What “value adds” are they offering over and above the service that you currently receive?
  • Do they have industry-specific experience or business process experience that would help you further achieve your goals?
  • What are their retention rates of existing customers? And more…

First and foremost, you will want the assurance of working with a partner that has proven credibility, expertise, and who will put your needs first. As an award-winning SAP Gold Partner, Absoft understand this. We have undertaken all types of transitions and come across all imaginable issues in our time working with SAP.

At Absoft, we are strong believers in having a proactive mindset when it comes to SAP support and have worked tirelessly in recent years to be ahead of the game when it comes to helping our customers get the most out of their SAP systems.

  • 45% of our team’s incident management time is spent on proactive activities that prevent future issues.
  • Furthermore, 57% of incidents are logged automatically by our monitoring system and resolved before they have any real business impact.

Being one of the few “boutique” SAP consultancies left in the UK, we really do become an extension to your team and build great relationships with our customer base. When it comes to our project work, 80% of our business is from repeat customers, which we believe speaks volumes about our team.

Taking the leap

We are confident that we can provide better value for money and lower the costs of your existing VAR contract. Book in for a free, non-obligatory, 1 HOUR SAP VAR CONSULTATION before the end of September to see for yourself.

How can my new SAP VAR partner ensure a smooth transition?

Change is not typically something that we look forward to! In our personal lives and in our business lives, we will often retain our current service provisions as it may seem more comfortable (even when a move to something new might offer better service and at a lower cost).

The key is ensuring a period of transition that is both seamless and cost-neutral.

Now, we can’t really speak for any other consultancies here, so I’ll tell you the method we adopt. At Absoft, we use a “tried and trusted” process, that has communication at its core.

  1. From the first day of transition, you’ll work with a single point of contact. Your experienced Support Manager will have defined a programme of activities and events around an agreed timescale that means moving your SAP support services result in minimum impact to normal business operations and is pain-free.
  1. Prior to appointing your Support Manager, we run a Solution Assessment to understand both your Applications use and Technical landscape (both On-Premise and Cloud).
  1. In addition to reviewing your software and system’s needs, we are also cognizant that it’s the human element of “relationship” that ensure smooth transitory period. With that in mind we build all our teams in a “one-to-one” alignment with a key process owner from your business.
  1. Our Support teams come with not only years and years of SAP knowledge, but many have joined us following long and successful careers in the business community. Furthermore, we hold an SAP Partner of Expertise certification for over a decade (read more about the rigorous audits and what PCoE VAR means here).
  1. Obviously one of the key elements to rapid transition is available documentation, so as part of the Solution Assessment we would seek to have access to both your functional and system’s documentation. In addition, we need to understand if some of your processes require interface with other systems and applications (often it is the interfaces that become a bottleneck to solving support issues).

 

Why Book an SAP VAR Partner Consultation with Absoft today?

At Absoft we take our responsibilities for client VAR Support very seriously, often providing annual cost reduction opportunities, implementing additional value-add services that you may not be aware of, and acting as a trusted advisor for your engagement and mediator with SAP.

As part of our ongoing improvements, we provide an automated Support solution that should mean we are aware of your system incidents before you are! We offer regular and essential monitoring checks to ensure that your SAP landscape retains its compliance, integrity, and longevity of operation.

See why and how to change your SAP VAR Partner, and take the opportunity to reduce your annual costs by booking a free consultation with us.

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